Posted by: Robin Amer on October 24, 2005 07:13 PM | Comments (1)

This was actually a panel I suggested to Third Coast in the feedback I sent them from last year, although it sounded like I wasn't the only one who requested it. I'll say again what I said to Julie & Johanna: pitching makes or breaks an independent producer. I found this out freelancing last year. If you can't pitch successfully, you can't work. Period. So how do you do it, and do it well?

They had on senior reps from three shows almost every producer wants to get on: All Things Considered, This American Life, and Weekend America. (well, maybe not every producer wants to get on Weekend America, but it seems like a place that will take pieces [more on that later] so if you're independent chances are you've probably pitched to them.)

One thing that I thought made this an interesting and successful panel was the fact that they had three brave souls stand up and actually pitch stories to the panel, as if they were actually pitching a story. And then let the panel tear them to shreds. Which mostly, it did. Luckily, most of the tearing was at least somewhat instructive. The most instructive was the tearing from TAL's senior producer Julie Snyder, who was very good at explaining what they were and were not looking for, mostly by example. (Note: Julie Snyder "do[es] not want to have coffee with you," so don't send her pitches asking to have coffee and talk over the pitch.)

The best set of instructive, pitch-tearing-apart examples sprung from a pitch made by Dacia Herbulock from KFAI's Listening Lounge. She pitched a story about going to Italy to find her family origins...extrapolate from there. Julie basically said three things about why she wouldn't take that pitch.

1) there's nothing at stake. Why does it matter if you go back and find your family?
2) family stories are much more interesting to you than they are to the rest of the world.
3) nothing surprising happens in the story. It pretty much plays out exactly the way you would expect it to.

Here's what Julie said about Dacia's pitch...

You're setting out to do something and find something. But what you want to know is, what's at stake? It's unclear what. Does it matter whether you find it or not? Personal family history is hard to do from a producing stand point because very very often it's a huge wall around it and it's not interesting to anyone else. You have to think of the entire time, what's at stake here that makes it interesting? Or you want to make stuff happen while you're on the road. You've got to have scenes and annecdotes that are going to affect you emotionally. I don't see what matters to you or to your family. I'm not clear about the relationship between you and your grandfather. Also, who's the central character in this? You? The concierge and the cop? What's the revelation? What are you going to discover? What are you going to find out?

I need to pitch your pitch to the 7 other people i'm working with. I have a really good idea of how all my co-workers are going to respond. I know what their questions are going to be, I know what their concerns are going to be. What else happens? If there's something you think is surprising that I think is really expected, I'll ask you about that. If i take your story into the story meeting i want it to be accepted, so I'll ask you about these things before I take it in to the meeting.

Tell me everything you know about the story and the characters. Characters are so important. Characters that are interesting and surprising and in turbulence...a story that is surprising in terms of the story line, that you didn't expect would happen, that opens itself up to something more. For me a lot of detail is helpful. I will pitch it in the most entertaining and annecdotal and entertaining way possible. So if you picture going to a bar with your friends, you're going to tell them anything that's funny or partifcularly sad or emotinoal, you'll use those moments to tell those stories to your friends. And that lets me know that you understand how to do a decent story. I don't totally mind a long pitch. Longer is better than shorter. - Julie Snyder

Julie gave as a counter example a family story that will actually air on TAL in a few weeks. It's about a woman who's mother was a Holocaust survivor, who was saved by a Polish family who hid her in an apartment building for 3 years. The lady goes back to Poland to find the family who saved her mother and say thank you.

Now, at this point, it sounds pretty much like every single Holocaust story you've already heard about three million zillion times. Except this: when the lady goes back, and does reconnect with this family, they say: we've been waiting for you. And you owe us. You owe us big, you owe us money. The Polish government was trying to collect all of these back taxes (not clear on this point...maybe cause the Jewish family had owned the apartment building and now the Polish family did). So now, this lady has spent something like five years and ten thousand dollars helping this Polish family. Because she does owe them. They saved her mother's life. But at what point is enough enough? When does she get to walk away and say, there, I payed you back?

See. Interesting, concrete, specific example of a family story that they would take, vs. one they wouldn't. Although, incidentally...there was a commentary on ATC the other day about a guy who's great great uncle was about to be canonized by the Vatican, and about going back to Italy and meeting his family, and it really wasn't all that different from the pitch Dacia made, save for the part about have a relative who's also a saint.

This made me think about a dynamic that was present in the panel, that was reinforced by another pitch. Independent producer Peter Crimmins pitched a story about a vandal who had been desecrating books in the San Francisco public library. He had been going through the card catalog and pulling out all the books that had to do with gay and lesbian issues, slashing those books and throwing them in a pile 600 deep in the basement. When the library found out, they didn't want to just throw away the books, because they felt that would be continuing the work of the vandal. So the solution they came up with was to give out the damaged books to artists, and have them turned into art pieces that would then be displayed in an exhibition at the library.

I think it's a great story. (Although, I have to disclose, I was one of the artists who received one of those books, although I never finished my piece and the damaged book is still sitting in my book shelf in my house, now also covered in white paint and sewed through with red thread in different places.) More to the point, if he had pitched that piece to Chris Turpin/ATC in particular at the time the exhibition was mounted, it would have totally gone on the air. I'm convinced ATC would have taken it, or at least they should have. It's interesting, it would have been timely, it would have had great scenes, and it's oh so public radio. Yet Chris Turpin was really not that into the pitch. And I'm convinced that it's because Julie Snyder was really shaping the tone of the conversation of the panel by talking about TAL's very specific concerns about character and surprise and character development and conflict. The more she said about those concerns, which I think are always important but are very specific to shaping the exact tone and format of her show, the more Chris Turpin and Jeremy Skeet were like, oh yeah, we think about that stuff too. Which is true. They do. But come on. Not to the same extent that TAL does. Their shows are just different. Which is fine. ATC and TAL are not the same shows, nor should they be. So while I can see TAL not taking the pitch for different reasons,
I think it would have been foolish for ATC not to have picked up the piece.

And a note about Weekend America. The secret dish I got from my friend who used to be an editor there was that their budget is so big (they got $2 million from CPB), and their staff is so (relatively) large that they literally take every pitch they get. All of them. And then they just pay out lots of kill fees to the producers whose pieces they kill midway through the process. Is that true, Jeremy Skeet? Barbara Bogaev? If so, well, then the notion of Jeremy Skeet talking about what makes a good pitch is kind of remarkable and funny. My question to him then might be, uh, so why take everything? And then, what do you kill? And do you know that those will be the pieces you kill when you take the pitch? Aren't you just messing with producers' heads by doing that? And making extra work for your staff? WTF?

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Posted by: Tara Anderson on October 25, 2005 03:38 PM